Municipality vs Government

Stuba Nikula

The word Creative Industries is of course a buzzword in Finland as well. I mean that we are losing the production to China like any other country in the outdoor museum called Europe. But currently most of that is done inside the Aalto University which is new university in Finland. It is a combination of 3 old universities the commercial one, the engineer one and the industrial art one. They have lots of programmes and they have lots of projects around this topic even the academic studies made out of it.

The city of Helsinki is very much in this development ideology as well but the problem is that it is only a municipality. The government runs projects and the government-based foundation funds the projects. They have the same goals as the Helsinki has. But it seems that they have really little to do with each other so in a sad way they seemed to go to the same direction but one of them has a high class Mercedes and the other one has an old Lada.

The funny thing looking from The Cable Factory point of view is that 20 years ago when we started and more than 20 years ago when the tenants started to lobby the city of Helsinki to fund the cultural center as we are now, nobody quite understood what it was about. It was just some freaky idea from the artist community. And for many still unexplainable reasons they were allowed to do that. And they and their idea was given this building.

But 5 years ago the city of Helsinki started to write strategies again to watch different topics and the biggest one of those is the strategy of business and trade. Surprisingly when I was reading it we were there all around. It was a lot about Helsinki wanting to be an active funny city and a good platform for small companies to grow and creative people to find a space for their passion and their work. And now I am reading the new strategies, there seemed to be a strategy out of everything in Finland, in Helsinki. We even have a food strategy here. What we have been doing 20 years here is now in the crossing of most of these strategies and it is going to be interesting to see where it is going to lead. From my point of view first it has to melt together with the governmental ideas and projects and then we will stop doing 2 separate things and start to work together for the same goal. 

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Stuba Nikula

Stuba Nikula

Managing director of Kaapeli and Suvilahti in Helsinki, Finland

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